In the movie Super Size Me, the star eats at a major fast-food chain for about 30 consecutive days. Within that brief time frame, he picks up over 24.5 pounds and is advised by his doctor to end the documentary immediately or risk his life. He experienced liver damage, sexual dysfunction, and mood swings. It took him 14 months to lose the weight. It is frightening to imagine there are millions of human beings consuming diets that are largely the functional equivalent of what the star of Super Size Me ate during the movie.
The Centers for Disease Control recently ranked obesity second only to smoking as the leading cause of preventable death. The growth in obesity can be tied to the upward trend in the consumption of high-fat foods, sugary foods, candies, and soft drinks. More than 10% of the worlds children are overweight with this figure rising to over 30% in many industrialized countries. For every $1 spent by the World Health Organization (WHO), the food industry spends $500 on promoting processed foods.
The food industry is approaching one trillion dollars in the U.S. With a world advertising budget of over $40 billion dollars, this figure is larger than the gross domestic product of over 70 percent of the world’s countries. Children are the most susceptible to this pervasive flow of imagery designed to influence them. The World Health Organization (WHO) reports increases in chronic diseases such as heart disease, cancer, and diabetes amongst the global population. The organization further notes a “probable” or “convincing” link between many of these diseases and the patterns of food consumed.
The WHO cites the negative effects of the following three points: 1) the adverse effects of high intake of energy (calorie) dense, low-nutrient foods; the adverse effects of high-intake of sugar-sweetened beverages; and 3) the adverse effect of heavy marketing of energy-dense foods and fast-food outlets.
These “non-communicable” diseases such as heart disease, diabetes, and obesity are considered to be communicated through cultural transmission from parents to children, from corporations to consumers, and from developed to less developed countries. The organization is calling for policies that will protect the world’s children from developing dietary habits that may result in disease and premature death.
There is a greater awareness of obesity, type 2 diabetes, cardiovascular disease, and diet-related cancers than ever before. A greater adoption of the “western” style diet high in fats, sugars, and salt threatens to undermine the health gains of the past century. With mature and developed markets around the world becoming saturated, multinationals are looking to less developed markets such as Eastern Europe, Latin America, and Africa as ripe opportunities to sell their products.
According to the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization the shift from subsistence farming to importation of foods from the industrialized world has led to a shift from diets dominated by grains and vegetables to ones dominated by high fat and sugar in developing countries. Japan presents a case-study for a progressive approach to dealing responsibly with the nutritional needs of school children.
In Japan, school children are prohibited from purchasing food or beverage while traveling either to or from school. The School Lunch Law sets nutritional standards for school lunches. Each school follows a well-balanced, low-fat (fat is limited to 25 to 30% of total calories), low-salt lunch of rice or bread and soup, 2 to 3 side dishes, milk, and desert. Families are provided with a menu each month providing caloric and nutritional breakdown.
Around the world there are aggressive community-based efforts to combat the enormous marketing pressures of multinational food corporations. For example, the Save Harry program has sent almost 30,000 letters to the author of the Harry Potter series attempting to persuade her to abandon her advertising agreement with Coca Cola.
Fight the Obesity Epidemic was established in New Zealand to address the growing challenge there. In New York City, school menus feature low-fat and low-salt menus, and sugary drinks have been replaced by fruit juice and water. The Naked Chef, Jamie Oliver, has forced changes in the entire U.K. public school lunch system.
There are efforts to make better choices for our children around the world, but there must be a sustained counter to an industry that is approaching a trillion dollars in annual revenue. It is a huge task, but what’s in the balance is our children’s long-term health prospects. It is worth the fight in my opinion. The star of Super Size Me stopped his experiment, but for millions of poor children this choice simply does not exist.
-By: Michael Imani
Michael Imani, Ph.D. is a diet expert who works with clients to find solutions for weight and life issues. He is the author of The Diet Code: 4 Steps to Permanent Weight Loss. http://www.michaelimanicoaching.com